Curious about adding calories.

heyaliwood458

Ive lost 110 pounds so far, so I have found what works for my body, but on days where Im super active or if I decide to add more to my workouts so that I can eat more, do I need to be adding more calories slowly as to not end up gaining?

Ive been eating around 1200 calories, MFP has my calories at 1220, and I never go below 1150 (I dont need any input on the 1200 calorie thing)

I dont want to be stuck being so restrictive forever though, so lets say I want to be eating 1500 calories a day, should I go slowly by only adding 100 calories a day to my diet along with longer workouts so I dont gain?

Im not sure if I need to add, but I workout for at least 45-60 min a day (walking/running/jump roap/crunches) so Im normally at a 500 deficit at the end of the day.

I know its all about having a calorie deficit, but I dont want to just jump to 1500 calories because Im not sure how my body will respond.

Arapacana1

Congratulations on your great results! Eating back some of your exercise calories will not make you gain weight, unless you have completely miscalculated how many calories you burn.

AnnPT77

Slowly increasing calories is a common strategy that many people find effective. I did.

The typical approach is to add 100 or so daily calories, wait a week or so, assess the loss rate, then add more if you're still losing. As you get closer & closer to maintenance calories, it's not unusual to have to take a little longer at a given level to know whether you're gaining/losing/stable, as your daily weight fluctuations can mask the trend somewhat.

Increasing workouts at the same time does complicate things. I guess I'd suggest following the same general approach you did for lesser workouts while losing weight. For example, if you were using the MFP exercise database to estimate calories, and eating back half of them (or whatever), I'd continue doing that, just do it with the greater number of estimated exercise calories you get from a higher amount or intensity of exercise.

If it turns out you're still losing at a rapid rate because of the added exercise, maybe add back daily calories in somewhat bigger increments at first, maybe 150-200 or more daily calories each week, until the weight loss slows down.

I hope that makes sense!

P.S. You might want to post these kinds of questions over in the "maintaining weight" forum area, where there are more people who've gone through maintenance adjustment already.

heyaliwood458

Thank you both for the advice! Im going to try adding 100 a week without adjusting my workouts to see what happens. I still want to lose 12 pounds so Im not yet trying to just maintain. Ive gotten down to 162 but I want to get to 150, my height is 5'9.

trigden1991

The last 10lbs are the slowest, your plan sounds like a good one.